With less than 72 hours remaining until they would deploy to polling places across Montgomery County, 30 students — from teens to senior citizens — studied the tangles of wires and unfamiliar touch screens in front of them on Saturday as instructor Ron Taylor rattled off directions. The election judges in training tried their best to keep up. Usually, they’d be studying this months earlier. But little about this primary election has felt normal for Maryland’s election workers, who are scrambling to accommodate a return to pre-pandemic in-person polling sites on a rescheduled primary date, in freshly redrawn legislative districts, while managing the influx of mail-in ballots that the pandemic ushered in.
